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Richard Nixon

The Life

By:
John A. Farrell

Narrated by:
Dan Woren

Length: 28 hrs and 54 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4.5 out of 5 stars
367

Performance

4.5 out of 5 stars
351

Story

4.5 out of 5 stars
346

Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.

5 out of 5 stars

Listen with an open mind

By
Suzanne R.
on
05-30-17

The Ghost

The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

By:
Jefferson Morley

Narrated by:
John Pruden

Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4.5 out of 5 stars
86

Performance

4.5 out of 5 stars
77

Story

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76

In
The Ghost, investigative reporter Jefferson Morley tells Angleton's dramatic story, from his friendship with the poet Ezra Pound through the underground gay milieu of mid-century Washington to the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate scandal. From the agency's MKULTRA mind-control experiments to the wars of the Mideast, Angleton wielded far more power than anyone knew.

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on
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Nixon's White House Wars

The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever

By:
Patrick J. Buchanan

Narrated by:
Arthur Morey

Length: 17 hrs and 34 mins

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From Vietnam to the Southern Strategy, from the opening of China to the scandal of Watergate, Pat Buchanan - speechwriter and senior adviser to President Nixon - tells the untold story of Nixon's embattled White House, from its historic wins to it devastating defeats. In his inaugural address, Nixon held out a hand in friendship to Republicans and Democrats alike. But by the fall of 1969, massive demonstrations in Washington and around the country had been mounted to break his presidency.

4 out of 5 stars

Interesting

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Jean
on
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The Nixon Defense

What He Knew and When He Knew It

By:
John W. Dean

Narrated by:
Joe Barrett

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Unabridged

Overall

4.5 out of 5 stars
175

Performance

4.5 out of 5 stars
164

Story

4.5 out of 5 stars
162

Watergate forever changed American politics, and in light of the revelations about the NSA's wide­spread surveillance program, the scandal has taken on new significance. Yet remarkably, four decades after he was forced to resign, no one has told the full story of Nixon's involvement in Watergate.

5 out of 5 stars

Nixon HAD no defense

By
Tad Davis
on
08-22-14

Hue 1968

A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

By:
Mark Bowden

Narrated by:
Joe Barrett

Length: 18 hrs and 45 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4.5 out of 5 stars
1,064

Performance

4.5 out of 5 stars
993

Story

4.5 out of 5 stars
984

By January 1968, despite an influx of half a million American troops, the fighting in Vietnam seemed to be at a stalemate. Yet General William Westmoreland, commander of American forces, announced a new phase of the war in which "the end begins to come into view". The North Vietnamese had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi had started planning an offensive intended to win the war in a single stroke.

4 out of 5 stars

I KNEW This Book Would Sting Me . . . .

By
Bee Keeper
on
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Blind Ambition

The White House Years

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Narrated by:
George Newbern

Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins

Unabridged

Overall

4.5 out of 5 stars
53

Performance

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49

Story

5 out of 5 stars
48

Blind Ambition is an autobiographical account of a young lawyer who accelerated to the top of the Federal power structure to become Counsel to the President at 30 years of age, only to discover that when reaching the top, he had touched the bottom. Most striking in this chronicle is its honesty. Dean spares no one, including himself. But, as
Time noted, Dean survived, despite the opposition of powerful foe, because he had no false story to protect and he had an amazing ability to recall the truth.

5 out of 5 stars

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Publisher's Summary

After being sworn in as president, Richard Nixon told the assembled crowd that "government will listen...Those who have been left out, we will try to bring in." But that same day, he obliterated those pledges of greater citizen control of government by signing National Security Decision Memorandum 2, a document that made sweeping changes to the national security power structure. Nixon's signature erased the influence that the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the CIA, had over Vietnam and the course of the Cold War. The new structure put Nixon at the center, surrounded by loyal aides and a new national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who coordinated policy through the National Security Council under Nixon's command. Using years of research and revelations from newly released documents, USA Today reporter Ray Locker upends much of the conventional wisdom about the Nixon administration and its impact and shows how the creation of this secret, unprecedented, extra-constitutional government undermined US policy and values. In doing so, Nixon sowed the seeds of his own destruction by creating a climate of secrecy, paranoia, and reprisal that still affects Washington today.

Intense. Very relatable to today's Washington DC

I constantly get the mental image of an M.C. Escher woodcut of interlocking figures, in this case a vast nebula of whirling figures with faces concealed and revealed in turns, multiple facets showing differently on all sides, with knives concealed and flashing in all directions likewise, in deadly earnest. The strategy of survival in this boiling crab-pot is only matched in my historical studies to, say, the paranoid days of late Nazi officials in their particular cauldron, or the pols sweating under Stalin's strange caprices. In my imagined woodcut, each player has as many multiple faces and stances and moves as there are, other persons encountered, feared or to be cultivated. And much of what would be, in any clinical setting, deemed paranoia is actually merely the real factual situation: the hidden knives are real. The apparitions are half of the time real, half of the time imagined. The victims are all too often very real. Careers, trust, sometimes bodies literally shattered. Battles happen through leaks, thinly veiled blackmail, betrayals signified by the tiniest bureaucratic symbolisms on up to the ones that decided the fates of countless American GIs, their fates physical and mental. How about: Nixon through a back-channel indicating to the USSR (far earlier than anything I'd ever read) that he was willing, in effect, to toss South Vietnam to the wolves in exchange for getting USA out with the right kind of face-saving? Without telling this to such marginalized figures as, say, his own Secretary of Defense? And in the time frame of other message-sending to the Soviets via secretly bombing Cambodia (over that Secretary's admonitions against it, with warnings it would leak some day)? (I can only thank fortune I wasn't tossed as a pawn into that chess game. The scars were immensely less, for me. I was a hair too young.) Toss J. Edgar Hoover and his own paranoid architecture into the middle of the wiretaps, back-stabbings, etc., and you get a feel for this pressure-cooker atmosphere. Sometimes, listening, I had to stop and catch my breath, astonished. Then there is the other side: maybe the bureaucracy had in its very core become such a can of worms, such an intractable den of snakes, it was a prime mover itself: its own maddening barriers and contradictions and leaks were perhaps driving Nixon deeper in these directions than his character could otherwise have taken him. Some characters are as if strapped into the nose cone of an experimental rocket, awaiting its accelerating trajectory to determine their fates, frenetically trying to steer the thing .... Wow, I'm glad I stayed on the west coast! DC is like a beguiling challenge and game,a siren song of power games that could devour souls. And (this being fall, 2016), echoes of this subtle and not-so-subtle bureaucratic war of all-against-all are rumbling almost inescapably, even on this far coast. Pity the fools. I pray, we and our fortunes do not all wind up as collateral damage.